Hospital parking review pushed back a few years

By Collin Gallant on April 9, 2018.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com @CollinGallant

A planned major review of parking around the Medicine Hat Regional Hospital could be pushed off for several years since the major expansion isn’t expected to be complete until 2020.

City planners hope to make minor changes in the meantime — something they’ve been doing already — a city committee heard on Wednesday. But, they say wholesale changes aren’t prudent until traffic patterns have stabilized after construction is mostly complete.

“As soon as we’re comfortable that there is some consistency with it (traffic flow), we will immediately proceed with a stakeholder process to prepare a (new parking) plan,” Dwight Brown, the general manager of the municipal works department, told the city’s development and infrastructure committee.

The issue was raised by committee chair. Coun. Robert Dumanowski, who said parking in the area is a near constant source of complaint from residents who approach him.

“The expansion was terrific news, and we lobbied hard to get it,” said Dumanowski, who added the length of construction and apparently no extra onsite parking “boggles the mind.”

“It’s prudent to wait while there’s still work redeveloping the entrances. That will change pedestrian and traffic flow in the community.”

Planners say interim relief for residents and visitors to the facility is difficult because major expansion has moved in phases around the site since 2014.

They don’t want to push parking problems to other areas nearby, said Brown.

“We don’t have a lot of room to move things around,” said Brown. “We don’t want to make a change (in the meantime) that we’ll have to change back six months later.”

The area, between the major traffic arteries of the Trans-Canada Highway and Gershaw Drive, which becomes Highway No. 3, creates a pie wedge that is about 800 metres in diameter.

Beyond the hospital, the area is also home to single-family residential housing, conversions to doctors offices, some commercial, care facilities, a school and hotel.

The department did an extensive review of parking in the area in 2010, which resulted in new meters on-street parking, two-hour restrictions on some blocks and a residential parking permit system.

More work was done in 2015 when major construction was just beginning. The entire area will likely be the subject of a planning review near the end of the current council term, which ends in 2022. And a lot of the work is related and could be combined, said Brown.